Seven Washington State University researchers received grants from the Commercialization Gap Fund (CGF) to fund projects like cancer therapy, fruit harvesting systems and crop tolerance.

The CGF awards are intended to provide the final step in commercializing the innovations of WSU researchers.

Clifford Berkman, a chemistry professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, earned his grant by developing a tunable pH linker, which connects a drug to a specific antibody in order to release the drug in the targeted cancer cell.

“A cancer drug is typically a drug that is designed to kill a cell,” Berkmann said. “But oftentimes its toxic or cytotoxic drugs that would be effective at killing cancer cells are also effective at killing normal cells, and that is part of the problem with side effects of chemotherapy.”

Berkman’s team developed a drug that can circumvent these unwanted side effects through the use of a new type of linker.

“We’ve developed a completely different linker that is not passive and is not dependent on enzymes, but it can be tuned to degrade at whatever pH is required or at whatever pH you want the drug to be released and how quickly you want the drug to be released,” Berkman said.

Berkman will use the CGF grant to build up a catalog of the customizable linker platforms developed by his team in order to get a foothold in the industry.

Amit Bandyopadhyay is a professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at WSU. Bandyopadhyay and his team are researching the effectiveness of silver in preventing implant infection.

“We have seen that the short term effects are good, but many times the infections come back on average three to four months later,” Bandyopadhyay said. “What we don’t know is if the amount of silver we are planning to use is going to hold for that longer term.”

Bandyopadhyay intends to use his award from the CGF to answer that question.

“This can potentially make a difference in many people’s lives,” Bandyopadhyay said. “I think that is also an added plus in this particular case.”

Hanjo Hellmann’s research deals with the improvement of agricultural traits in order to increase yield, plant stress tolerance and biofuel production. He is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at WSU.

“There are certain processes in plants that control the stability of proteins,” Hellmann said. “These can effect different processes in plants, like stress sensitivity, flowering time or metabolism.”

This is the basis of Hellmann’s research.

“Part of the mechanism, when we apply it in plants, show that we got quite significantly elevated fatty acid levels in seeds of certain plants,” Hellmann said. “That is of interest to the industry because you can potentially increase biofuel production.”

Additionally, Hellmann can apply his research to control traits such as drought resistance and flowering time in crops. 

Mark De Kleine works for the Center for Precision and Automated Agricultural Systems and earned his doctorate in Biological Systems Engineering in December. Kleine’s research led to the creation of an apple harvesting system.

“So, if you can imagine a triangle and at the tip of the triangle would be a portion that would grab onto a branch,” De Kleine said. “The other two points of the triangle are pinned to electric motors, so I can change the position of that end point by rotating the electric motors.”

Using this device, De Kleine can remove apples more quickly than by picking each fruit individually.

“To get this to the market, of course there needs to be ongoing tests, that’s for sure,” De Kleine said. “It just needs to be refined from the science side to the industry side.”

De Kleine hopes that this device will help Washington-based specialty crop growers become more efficient in automating and mechanizing operations.

Hans Van Dongen, Matthew Whiting and Hanwu Lei are also recipients of the CGF awards.

Van Dongen is a director and research professor with the Sleep and Performance Research Center at WSU Spokane. His developed an interface based on steering wheel movements in order to alert fatigued drivers and prevent potential accidents.

Whiting is an assistant professor in the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture. Whiting is researching a harvesting technique in which trees are gently shaken in order to release fruit.

Lei, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering, earned the grant for his research in renewable energy through the use of biofuels and aromatics.